Profit-seeking enterprises are constantly seeking ways of leveraging technological innovations to realize greater than average financial gains and to obtain competitive advantages over other industry participants. Technological innovations in the areas of electronic commerce (“e-commerce”), networking, and messaging are of particular interest to organizations involved in business-to-business (“B2B”) and business-to-consumer (“B2C”) transactions over the Internet in that such innovations enable organizations/entities to engage in electronic commerce with a larger pool of trading partners at a reduced cost and without experiencing significant time delays, being hampered by geographic separations/inaccessibility, and/or requiring fixed (i.e., non-mobile) network connections.
The integration and interoperability issues that would normally arise when developing a computing infrastructure that is sufficiently robust and flexible to support the high volume traffic and heterogeneous application programs and platforms of trading partners engaging in electronic commerce are partially mitigated through recent innovations in messaging middleware software. Messaging middleware enables disparate application programs and platforms to coexist and communicate without requiring trading partners to undertake complex and expensive development efforts or significant infrastructure upgrades. Accordingly, e-commerce participants and providers have a continuing interest in reducing costs/complexity and in enhancing messaging technologies to further streamline e-commerce into a series of seamless business transactions, without requiring such participants to have detailed knowledge of, or otherwise have to address, the underlying technology or infrastructure that enables this seamless interaction.